Thirty years of interviews, photography, research and translation of documents of this camp are being added to this site with the goal of informing,

publishing, and connecting with survivors and other researchers. Please share your knowledge and experience and let us know it you allow us to

add your input to the site. Copies of Call Me André and The Hell of Alsace are available for purchase in hard copy for $50 each.

 

We gratefully

will accept donations to help fund the work featured on this website and the translation of important documents and texts from the original French.

Diana Mara Henry is available for speaking engagements about the camp, the World War Two career of spy André Joseph Scheinmann and

the resistance. These presentations can be tailored to the audience's background knowledge and to be age-appropriate.

CV of this site's author

 

All materials not under copyright by others are Copyright © 1985-2015 Diana Mara Henry

Attention publishers and academics: You may not reproduce without permission nor present this research as your own.

Article by Loup Espargilière about Diana Mara Henry's research appearing 8/26/2016 in Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace:

Photo Copyright © Diana Mara Henry

While in Alsace to visit the camp this summer, DMH was interviewed on French radio: Here, courtesy of reporter Olivier Vogel of  France Bleu Alsace (https://www.francebleu.fr/alsace) are some clips:

About the Jews at the KLNa:

About André Scheinmann:

 

About NATZWEILER-STRUTHOF/

Konzentrationslager Natzweiler/KLNa:

War-time documentary footage of the camp after liberation

 completed on 22/23.11/44 when the camp was discovered ( see Galitzine report )

Chronology of the KLNa
Maps showing location of N-S

Report on the camp in December 1944

by Captain Yurka N. Galitzine to the Chief of Liberated areas

Official images from the year 2014 at the camp's site and museum

Recent links from the internet related to Natzweiler, including

French President Hollande's visit April 26, 2015...

 

Photographs of the camp - outline of illustrated lecture - Caution: graphic

Most recent slide show about the KLNa

André Joseph Scheinmann, Freedom Fighter and Spy, slide show

 

Book review by Diana Mara Henry in the Journal of Military History, April 1,2015

European Resistance in the Second World War, edited by Philip Cooke and

Ben H. Shepherd, reviewed by Diana Mara Henry, 525-27

 

Background of Presenter and endorsements of this project.

Presenter's Résumé / other WWII website and family websites:

www.FrontSeattoWar.com &  Vanished Jews of Alsace

Testimonials/endorsements by noted scholars

SURVIVORS REMEMBER

and REMEMBERANCE of those LOST

Auguste Frerotte, Belgian NN, #2278, war hero.

Dziga Tanacs, survivor of the gas chamber, Shoah Foundation testimony

Johnny Hopper, (Ian Kenneth Hopper 1913-1991)

British NN, also at Neue Bremm, Mauthausen, Dachau

Jean Léger: KLNA, Kochem, Dachau, Allach,

wrote Petite Chronique de l'Horreur  Ordinaire

Oskar Klausenstock was in the slave labor camps

Joseph Scheinmann, aka André Peulevey #4368:

His mug shot on arrival at the KLNa and his

Portait by Gayot on the day they moved to Dachau:

 

Freedom Fighter and Spy: website

Jean Schmit : his family remembers

Ivan Stular #60974: his family remembers

Franciszek Blachut: his family remembers

Aron Skrobek, unionist

Phillip Maisel #35146, an inmate of

Dautmergen and Frommern [subcamps]1944/1945.

Eugène Marlot #6149Sac d'Os and L'Enfer d'Alsace,

Henri Rosencher: Le Sel, La Cendre, La Flamme:

A Jewish fighter's story

Joseph Linden: KLNa / Neckar-Elz survivor

Roger Monty, #6992: his recent correspondence and memorial page

at the website of the Centre Européen du Résistant Déporté

Monsieur le Chanoine Hess, Catholic cleric, a prisoner

General Delestraint,Free French Commander,

imprisoned at Natzweiler

Boris Pahor: the KLNa's most honored literary figure

Floris Bakels Nacht und Nebel:

a Dutch proeminentem's memoir

Christian Ottosen and other Norwegians at Natzweiler

Arne Brun LieNight and Fog:

A Norwegian survivor's book, podcast and film

 

Bombardier Alfred George JONES and others remembered: see links for

Johnny Hopper, Nacht und Nebel, and Seeing through the Fog

Wikipedia's info on other survivors:

Xavier, Duke of Parma

Tadeusz Borowski, author of  This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Alf Martinius Grindrud

Haakon Sørbye

Brian Stonehouse

Albert-Marie Edmond Guérisse

organized French and Belgium escape routes for downed Allied pilots under the alias of Patrick Albert "Pat" O'Leary

His portrait:

 

(Colored triangles represent some of the categories of prisoners at the KLNa including, from top: French political prisoner, man with no nationality, common criminal, German, Jehovah's Witness, Gypsy, Asocial, Homosexual, Jew, Jewish political prisoner.There were more...)

More information and links:

 

A film from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

 

The "Nacht und Nebel" decree -

A crime against humanity - now called "Enforced Disappearance"

 

The Gas Chamber  - Most recent remains found July 2015

-CAUTION GRAPHIC - Nazi doctors at Natzweiler

Honoring the memory of the 86 Jews from Auschwitz who were gassed

and the burial of the bodies, other activities of the Cercle Menachem Taffel

The story of two Belgian Jewish women who were gassed

Charles Osgood records in a CBS documentary the placement,

by Steve Draisin and Shimon Samuels of the

first memorial to the Jews who died in the gas chamber

 

SS Decree of October 10, 1942 to "cleanse all concentration camps of Jews"

 

Pastor Niemoller's statement

 

Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman's Holocaust Project

 

•A monument to those who perished at the KLNa

is dedicated at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

 

Schirmeck connection

 

Resources to research a French resistor (in French)

 

 

 

 

No one can write an exhaustive book on a concentration camp, but one can certainly try to indicate all its aspects, resources for further study, and questions posed by its operational structure in the context of the other Konzentrationslagers, Nazi ideology, and Europe at war.

This site creates a scholarly and publications center (Natzweiler Press) for the tragic and little-known concentration camp of Natzweiler-Struthof, (to the SS: KLNa) the only Nazi Konzentrationslager located in France, operating between 1941 and 1944 for the slave labor and brutal destruction of an (almost) exclusively non-Jewish population and the gassing and “medical” experimentation on Jews and Gypsies in the main camp. Nevertheless, 10,426 of its total registration number of 52,000 prisoners are known to be Jewish. They arrived in 1944 and 1945 to slave in the 70 subcamps (Kommandos) of  Natzweiler, as Auschwitz and Radom were emptied in the East before the advance of the Russian army, and Hungarian Jewry was destroyed.

Besides these aspects which it shares with many other camps, KLNa has certain more remarkable aspects. It became, for example, the primary center for the punishment of the category of political prisoners known as "NN." Their "Nacht und Nebel" status was determined by specific decree and judicial procedures practically unknown in the US today, where "Night and Fog" is thought to represent the quality of existence in the camps rather than the specific sentence under the NN Erlass (OKW Commander Keitel's decree) accorded some of those deemed most dangerous resistors and saboteurs of the Third Reich.

The camp was accorded “Category III” status, and like Matthausen, which detroyed Spanish Communists and others in its quarry under conditions of staggering overwork and cruelty, Natzweiler was used to destroy Russians under similar conditions at its quarry site, while two dozen other European nationalities suffered famine, untreated disease, physical and mental abuse, and medical experimentation in the central camp and its 70 exterior slave labor sites.

This is why all the nations of Europe, including the Roma and Sinti, are represented at the yearly commemoration ceremonies at the camp, a French national historic monument: survivor memoirs of the camp exist in their native languages of Slovene, Dutch, Norwegian, French and English.

By force of the years which now separate us from the tragic events, the survivor literature of the camp is nearly complete, barring certain memoirs which may yet come to light and be published posthumously. I have collected dozens of them and will present excerpts of them all, both to illustrate the coherence of their descriptions of the same brutal acts and the unique qualities of individual memory, and to pay tribute to the heroes who lived in our time. You are welcome to contact and to add your documentation.- Diana Henry

Natzweiler-Struthof Weblog

To be uploaded, available on request:

Nuremburg Documents

Memorial page of names

“Liberation” of the camp
Dachau connection
Escape from NS

Videos and Films

Bibliography 

Papers Presented

 2019: "From French National Monument to Site of European Heritage " Second Andrew W. Mellon Conference entitled "Traversing the Gap: Relevance as a Transformative Force at sites of Public Memory" June 19-21, 2018

2019: "Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide: the case of the KLNa" First International Conference of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies, University of North Carolina Charlotte, April 13-14, 2019

2018- "Cher Camarade: Translator and Spy-The World War II Career of Joseph Scheinmann aka André Peulevey" German Studies Association 7th Program Summer Workshop, Freie       Universität, Berlin

2018- "Reclaiming identity: efforts to overcome the 'malaise of memory' at the Natzweiler concentration camp" Reflections on the Afternaths of War and Genocide Symposium:       "Memorialization Unmoored: The Virtualization of Material Mediums of Social Memory", Genocide Studies Program, Yale University, March 8-9.

2018- "Prefaces, conclusions and dedications. Rationales and perspectives of survivor memoirsof the Konzentrationslager KLNa" Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current            International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution Sixth international multidisciplinary conference hosted by the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck, University of London, January 10-12

2016- "Child victims, survivors, and observers of Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp/KLNa" Children and War: Past and Present, Third international multidisciplinary conference; Salzburg, July 13-15.

2016- “Reclaiming Identity: The Case of the Jews in the Natzweiler Concentration Camp “ 5th Global Conference on Genocide, International Network of Genocide Scholars, Hebrew        University; Jerusalem, June 26-28.

2015- "Pain in the memoirs of survivors of the KLNa." Translating Pain: International Forum on Language, Text and Suffering; Monash University, Melbourne, August 2015.

2010- " Memoirs of a Jewish Spy" Fortieth Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches;

Temple University, March 7-10

2009- "Life was not Beautiful: Writing the Lived History of a Neglected Concentration Camp - KL Natzweiler-Struthof," Association for Jewish Studies, 41st Annual Conference; Los               Angeles, December 20-22.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS:

 

Amicale Nationale de Natzweiler-Struthof on Facebook!

 

The museum at Natzweiler:

The Camp's Website

The Centre Européen du Resistant Déporté (CERD)

The Centre Européen du Resistant Déporté is on Facebook!

CERD's "Documents Pedagogiques"

DMH photograph of Eugene Marlot overlooks

a ceremony of the CERD

Eugène Marlot photograph on screen by Diana Mara Henry

 

Contact: dmh@dianamarahenry.com with your questions, comments and suggestions. Thank you

Please do not reproduce these materials without permission. Doing so, or buying someone else's use of them, is theft.

THIS WEBSITE'S CONTENTS ARE COPYRIGHT © DIANA MARA HENRY

 

YouTube links for Natzweiler

French youth remember:

An 8th grade class sets up markers at the KLNa

Concours National de la Résistance et de la Déportation:

Every year a different theme is given for students to work on.

In 2011-2012 it was resistance in the camps, with documents from

The Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation of Besançon

More worksheets for students from the

Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation in Besançon.

 

The KLNa's slave labor dependencies

Natzweiler's 70 Kommandos -

Forced Labor 1939-1945 Memory and History website

New book published about Kommando Bisingen

 

Contact: dmh@dianamarahenry.com with your questions, comments and suggestions. Thank you

Please do not reproduce these materials without permission. Doing so, or buying someone else's use of them, is theft.

THIS WEBSITE'S CONTENTS not otherwise copyrighted ARE COPYRIGHT © DIANA MARA HENRY